


Red

by Captain_Loki



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Budapest, F/M, Miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-29
Updated: 2012-08-29
Packaged: 2017-11-13 02:50:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Captain_Loki/pseuds/Captain_Loki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happened in Budapest was always shrouded in mystery, but Natasha always said she had red in her ledger; some things are harder to wipe out than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red

**Author's Note:**

> This wounded me to write, but I saw a gif on tumblr and the story popped (read: slashed and shot its way) into my subconscious so I had to get it out

It’s not until she’s staring down the barrel of the gun does it feel real in a way that nothing had before that. His hands are steady, but there’s sweat pooling at his temples and a look in his eye that betrays him, that hesitation, while his finger poises over the trigger, gives him away. The words fall from her lips before she can stop them.

“I’m pregnant.” She thinks it should come out sounding desperate, a plea for her life and that of her unborn child, but it’s calm…and she wonders if he’ll think it a bluff, the last act of a cornered animal.

His gaze flickers from her face to her stomach, but there’s not even a slight swell there, she’s not starting to show yet, not really.

“Is that so?” He asks her, his voice is just a notch too high to be as casual as he’s aiming for, and she nods, her red curls clinging to her damp forehead.

“It’s yours.” She tells him. Barton’s expression goes blank for a moment before his pupils dilate, his lower lip trembling softly as he stares at her, hard. It’s a calculating sort of look; she’s seen it a thousand times, that split second decision to kill or not to kill.

She’s never offered that look, it’s never been a question. She can feel the gun hidden in her boot and knows she’d could pull it off, but then Barton is lowering his own weapon and her breath stops involuntarily in her throat.

He’s watching her like he’s expecting that move, the drop, roll and sliding her 9mm out…she’s perfected it over the years. But Natasha doesn’t move. She’s not sure who’s more surprised. And it’s suddenly the most awkward near assassination in history, and Natasha’s a little hyped up on the adrenaline coursing through her system, and there are dead bodies on the ground, and she thinks there’s brain matter across the toe of her boot and she wants to laugh but it comes out in tears instead that roll silently down her cheek while she watches the man before her, ringing his gun uncertainly in his hands.

Suddenly, Natasha craves his touch, his hands rough and calloused, and the way his fingertips would glide across her skin with the care and attention he’d usually only reserved for his bow. And she’d been crafted into a weapon at an early age, but Barton wielded his bow like an instrument, like a practiced violinist, and beneath his careful touch she’d felt, for the first time since she could remember, like a force of good instead of destruction.

She realizes, with a sudden dawning comprehension that her longest con is not the one staring at her with uncertainty but herself, because somewhere in those months of feigning affection for Barton, while he feigned affection for her, they’d both somehow managed to deceive neither but themselves.

“Clint.”

  
They spent that night in a rundown motel just outside of Budapest, with graffiti scrawled across the side of the building and a broken lock on the dirty bathroom window. Clint couldn’t stop caressing Natasha’s stomach and she thought, with something bordering on panic, how much it scared her that she didn’t want to push his arm away.

They lay together until the sun rose on a bed that was probably infested with something, but she’d slept in worse places. They drank flat soda and ate broken chips from a busted vending machine for breakfast and when Natasha stood to go to the bathroom Clint started to follow.

“I’ve got this Barton, been doing it on my own a few years now,” Natasha teases lightly, but there’s that familiar panic rising in her, and she shuts the door in his face. She wonders, as she stares at her reflection in the grimy mirror, and sees the open window behind her, whether he wanted to play body guard or babysitter.

Panic again. She throws up her pitiful meal but she’s not sure if it’s morning sickness or food poisoning. Clint busts through the door either way.

“Jesus Clint, I can fucking take care of myself,” she tells him, shoving him aside, but he grasps her wrist in his hand and turns her around.

“But you don’t have to.”

She wishes that were true.

  
They avoid talking. There’s pacing, and sitting, and standing, and more pacing, before finally Natasha clears her throat.

“Are you…you’re keeping it?” Clint asks her, like he’s suddenly not certain. She stares at him and her eyes fill with painful stinging tears again and she looks away.

“I can’t think of a worse fucking idea,” she tells him, honestly. He sighs heavily and collapses beside her on the bed.

“I want you to keep it,” he tells her, his voice soft and honest, and filled with a fear that scares her more than she’s willing to admit.

“Yeah, and when it’s all grown up we can tell it how we met, yea kiddo he didn’t pull that trigger and it was just then that I knew—”

  
“Nat.” Her jaw snaps shut with a clack.

“What do we do?”

“Run?” Natasha says, then huffs a laugh.

“S.H.I.E.L.D has too many resources,” Clint says.

“I have too many enemies,” Natasha says.

“You could come back with me,” Clint tells her, looking at her long and hard and Natasha suddenly wants nothing more than to nod, agree, because Clint looks so hopeful she actually believes for that split second that maybe she could.

But in the end, they both know what it was coming to and Natasha leaves, with Barton sprawled naked beneath threadbare sheets, and despite the other life growing inside her she’d never felt so inescapably alone.

It only takes Clint three days to catch up with her, though if she were being honest she’d left sizeable breadcrumbs trailing in her wake. He pretends to be angry, but mostly he just seems relieved, and when Natasha asks what he’ll do he says,

“Whatever you want. I’m with you…100 percent.” She kisses him then, like the world is on fire and she’ll die if she doesn’t, and maybe she will. Because she’s always used sex the way she uses knives and guns, just another weapon to be exploited. But this feels crushing, because she can’t get close enough to him, and she wants to keep kissing him until the world really does just burn away and it’s only them.

But then there’s always reality coming crashing down around them, and they’re running, constantly. It’s chaotic but it’s a familiar kind of chaos. There’s a different kind of purpose now, a desperation skimming just beneath the familiar need to disappear.

There are baby clothes packed away beside her knife collection now.

Despite everything: the running, dodging S.H.I.E.L.D agents, and trying to get by beneath the radar of everyone Natasha had ever pissed off…for the first time for both of them, they’re a we. And Natasha had never had anyone she could rely on before, no one she had ever put any of her trust in and she gave it to Clint, maybe not so willingly at first, but it felt…like finally she could put her guard down.

Which she knows, is always your first, and last mistake.

  
It happens three months after they leave Budapest. Natasha wakes in the middle of the night from a nightmare of flashbacks. It takes only a moment for the images to fade, but the agonizing pain starts and she realizes something is horribly wrong.

They break their rule, or Clint does anyway because Natasha is too busy biting through her lip to keep from screaming as she passes out in Clint’s arms on the way to the nearest hospital. Clint wants doctors and sterile walls; he wants technology and high tech instruments…he wants a fucking miracle.

  
In the end, it doesn’t make a difference.

Natasha doesn’t think the news should come as that much of a shock really. The Doctors in Kolkata and back in the States said the same thing…it was a miracle the child was conceived in the first place. There was bargaining, there was blaming, Clint on himself like maybe if he’d dragged her back to S.H.I.E.L.D in the first place, all that running, all that stress…

“It would have been incredibly unlikely you would have carried to term.” The sound of it plays on repeat in her head, and she laughs sickeningly at herself, ‘pretty devastated over a kid you didn’t want’. She thinks it’s her state of newfound dumbstruck submission and apathy that makes S.H.I.E.L.D take an interest.

She realizes, after she’s inducted, that they don’t know. Don’t know the real reason she and Clint went AWOL after the shit storm that was Budapest. The agent that came to collect them from the hospital in Kolkata, Agent Coulson, wasn’t exactly thorough in his report.

He had kind eyes, they reminded her of Clint’s a bit with their expression of open earnest and sincerity. But she was pretty drugged out when he came to talk to her for that first time in her hospital bed. When he questioned her, when he offered her a second chance.

She has red in her leger, and she wants to wipe it out.


End file.
